Hegemony and The Gluten Free Diet

(image source)

 For this week's topic of Hegemony, I thought of diet and health trends that have become mainstream even if they are wholly irrelevant or potentially dangerous. I usually like to write my topics and blogs based on something I have a little bit of experience with, and I very easily remembered my struggle with the gluten-free diet. Allow me to regail you:

I chose to adopt a gluten-free lifestyle for nearly a decade through my teen years due to unidentified digestive issues. I had excruciating stomach pain coming on most strongly when I was about 13; I would lay sick in bed for a few days and when I began to feel better one of the things I would try to begin eating again was some toast or plain pasta. After a few cycles, my mother began to notice that I would quickly get sick again just after I had regained my appetite.

It was a terrible few months of this cycle, and my mother did a lot of research, finally finding a specific diet called the GFCF Diet that mostly pertained to children with Autism (my mother specializes in Autism spectrum education). This diet cut out all carbs, starch, grains, pretty much everything except for fruit, vegetables and water - no kidding! As my health improved after a few weeks of eating only raw simple sugar molecules, I slowly added back one foodgroup per week, waiting until I ate something that would make me ill and mark itself as my culinary enemy. Sure enough, it was bread, and having been going through hell for so long I was quickly persuaded into eliminating all grains from my diet (save for rice and potato). It was assumed that I had Celiac disease, which is an auto-immune disorder where your body believes gluten to be a foreign non-food substance and attacks its own digestive system.

At that time, gluten-free food was virtually unheard of. Go to a grocery store or restaraunt? They had never seen such a thing. Most people 15 years ago didn't even have a concept of what gluten was in the first place. My mother and I experimented with many terrible muffin and pancake recipes that called for ground almond meal, butter, and applesauce... yuck. Eventually we found a specialty store that had frozen gluten-free bread which was made from rice flour, it always came frozen and was very dry and crumbly (and expensive!).

The exact bread I used to get! (source)

Gluten-free has become a much bigger and more well-known trend, and truly a trend it is. Even after I finally felt that there was awareness about Celiac disease and began finding gluten-free products, I also soon realized that many people were eating gluten-free because they believed it was healthier for them - not because they would get violently ill if they ate it. I was rather miffed, that my struggle and pain had suddenly turned into the next Atkins diet. It made me want to be normal again, more than missing bread had done. There was evidence beginning to emerge that Celiac disease was even more rare to have than just being sensitive to gluten or feeling sick from a certain food. Celiac disease is a genetic auto-immune disorder, there was no way half the country had it! I began to doubt everything I had been through, and also began to cheat on my diet to test the boundaries.

I finally had a blood test done in 2012 to determine once and for all if I had the genetic marker for Celiac and it was negative. I had a perfect tolerance to gluten in foods and from a medical standpoint should not have ever had any issue eating bread. I happily went out and bought pizza and donuts and had a field day eating it and not getting sick at all! Though of course I still had many questions and my grievances with the diet hipsters were still burning strong. They would soon find out the truth:

Today there is very strong evidence against the gluten-free diet, because it is plainly and simply not necessary for the average person to worry about. It does not help one lose weight or reduce cholesterol or anything similar. Whether it was because of similar struggles like my own, or only because someone popularized it as the new "low-carb diet" there is now an abundance of gluten-free products available on store shelves, and in restaurants of all kinds. You can order a burger at Red Robin with a gluten-free bun, and there are boxes of gluten-free pasta and cake mixes in stores - things I only could dream about when I was 13! Most people buy these things without knowing any of the history of the movement at all, and without realizing that unless they have a medical sensitivity or Celiac disease, they could be saving a lot of time and money by sticking with normal foods that cost less and taste better - let's be honest, Gluten-free things will never ever taste the same as gluten-laden foods. I'm happy to be healthy again, and to eat as much cake as I want!

Mmmm donuts! (image source)

In this case, it was more the upper class part of society that deemed the Gluten-free diet trendy and made it inclusive, and it certainly takes a fair amount of money to be able to buy ready-made GF products off the shelf rather than making everything from scratch yourself, but it was essentially a minority that had the disease and needed the initial products. Only after someone created a fad out of the specialty food did it become mainstream, and now nobody really gives it a second thought that we have so many options for gluten-free alternatives (and other allergy-sensitive products) when 10 years ago nobody was talking about it. This conflicts with mainstream society because although fad diets have been around for centuries, its rare that a diet created out of medical necessity for a little-known auto-immune disorder becomes so wide-spread and the original meaning forgotten. Now the trouble only lies in properly educating those who see it as a fad diet instead of a medical necessity before it could potentially be a reverse health hazard for those choosing to not consume gluten when they really should be.